5 ms·
The lesson, I guess, is that if you print money from some other dominant business unit, you don't have to have any other good ideas or execution.
by scld 5y ago
The lesson, I guess, is that if you print money from some other dominant business unit, you don't have to have any other good ideas or execution.
- ethbr0 5y agoGoogle has tons of other good ideas. They just seem to suck at executing them. And specifically, at evolving and supporting them.
- travisgriggs 5y agoWhy do you think that is?
- Closi 5y agoI suspect it’s cultural - maybe starting new apps is seen as more desirable than making existing apps better. And if you keep starting new apps you can’t keep iterating/updating/maintaining all the old ones too without spreading your engineering talent too thinly. Google’s internal culture, at least from the outside, doesn’t seem to be one that often releases a bad product and iterates it into a good one - sometimes they do, but with most either it gets lots of interest/users from day 1 of general release or it’s quickly abandoned.
- hulitu 5y agoGoogle culture seems to be : they release a bad product and they make it worse. Android Auto is crap. Never worked
- ethbr0 5y agoWhat seems broken at Google is the iteration process. I'll let more informed others speculate as to why. But I would contrast it with Apple (who seem to spend much longer in the pre-release baking stage + have a more mature user feedback cycle post-release [for hardware...]) and Amazon (spray and pray + iterate like crazy + a more mature deprecation and support story) and Microsoft (developers, developers, developers [and especially enterprise developers]).
- AlbertCory 5y agoI worked there 11 1/2 years. An engineer gets promotion from "having impact." Improving an existing app is usually not enough impact. Replacing it with some shiny new thing is. Once it's out there, you ideally transfer to something else where you can also have impact, or you quit & join an outside company. As many people have pointed out, your own manager cannot promote you; only the Promotion Committee can (although your manager can certainly help).